Introduction: the role of affect in STEM teacher learning

How does it feel to hear colleagues doubt mathematics students' ability to learn?What might move otherwise asset-oriented teachers to express such sentiments?What simmers beneath their responses, and how might professional development facilitators support their affective learning?Several recent reviews have identified a marked increase in the amount of research on teachers' affect and/or emotions over the past few decades.In response to longstanding and widespread agreement that emotions are integral to teachers' lived experiences and that teaching is an emotional practice (e.g., Hargreaves, 1998), teacher education scholars are increasingly examining the nature of teachers' emotions, their antecedents, and their consequences (e.g., J. Chen & Cheng, 2021); the unwritten rules that regulate emotional displays in schools (e.g., Stark & Bettini, 2021); and how emotions interact with specific types of teaching, such as teaching for social justice (Reagan & Hambacher, 2021).However, even as these scholars call for further attention to teacher emotion, the role of affect in STEM teacher learning remains seriously underexplored.Perhaps this is because STEM disciplines are still widely viewed as objective and neutral, and as privileging rationality over other ways of knowing or modes of expression.Plenty of research from a wide range of disciplines and theoretical traditions, however, illustrates that emotions are integral to human experience and consequently, to learning.In fact, because "affect infuses disciplinary practices" (Jaber & Hammer, 2016, p. 192), ignoring emotions means ignoring important aspects of how people do and learn STEM, and relatedly, how they learn to teach STEM.By contrast, acknowledging emotions and treating them as powerful pedagogical resources has the potential to be rehumanizing and even subversive (Boler, 1999;Gutirrez, 2022).To this end, researchers are increasingly examining G. A. Chen et al.articles in this issue, use affect and emotion interchangeably to describe the non-cognitive, often embodied, feelings that STEM teachers experience in their work.We imagine, however, that careful conceptualizations of affect and emotion beyond the individual and sociocultural, drawing on affect theories from other disciplines, could spark significant advances in future research.The papers in this special issue illuminate the character and role of emotions in teacher resistance, learning, and agency, naming not only that STEM teachers experience emotions as they learn but what happens as a result.They highlight the importance of accounting for affect and emotion in theories of teacher learning, and, by implication, in the design of teacher education, offering a foundation for future empirical research and theory development.Though they begin to fill in the blanks about the role of affect in STEM teacher learning, we know there are many more fascinating questions out there, and that many scholars are already considering some of them.We hope that this special issue whets your curiosity and invite you to join us.